


invisible machinery

by Mia_Zeklos



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anakin Skywalker Leaves the Jedi Order, Artificial Intelligence, Big Bang Challenge, F/M, Introspection, long-winded discussions about the Self (TM), open but hopeful ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:27:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27345823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mia_Zeklos/pseuds/Mia_Zeklos
Summary: “Can you—” Having a visual would have helped – it always has in the past when it comes to machinery, but she’s neither here nor there when it comes to that. “Can you see me?”“I know what you look like from your file, the same as everyone.” It sounds so matter-of-fact that he almost feels silly for asking. How would she know anything else? Her entire life so far had been in this in-between state; relying on both her senses and the bottomless pit of memory that her mind must be. “But I can’tsee, no. I imagine this is what you were sent here to take care of.”She soundsnothing like a droid. They don’t imagine things, don’t make assumptions; reality is set in stone, the facts woven together from the data they’ve been fed. Machines are fallible, but their minds rarely are.Then again, she’s not a machine. “No one told you?”(Shortly after leaving the Jedi Order for good, Anakin Skywalker ends up on Naboo - a planet with a queen they built themselves in the hopes of creating the perfect leader. He's given the responsibility of bringing her closer to her subjects and ends up growing closer to her himself instead.)
Relationships: Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 12
Kudos: 41
Collections: VarykiNovember 2020: Anidala Big Bang





	invisible machinery

**Author's Note:**

> Hello all! This was written for the Anidala Big Bang, betaed by ahsokastars on tumblr, who did a wonderful job out of it despite my late arrival with the full product, and queenaryastark, who did the absolutely amazing manips attached to the fic here. Thank you both so much! This is my first Big Bang and participating made me so, so happy!  
> Title from [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74PxwSlUiS8).
> 
> Hope you guys enjoy it and, as always, feedback is most welcome!

_Can you offer me proof of your existence? How can you, when neither modern science nor philosophy can explain what life is?_  
\- _Ghost in the Shell_ (1995)

There is no such thing as a perfect politician.

Compared to his Masters, Anakin hadn’t spent a long enough time in the universe to inflict its wisdom upon its inhabitants, but that much he _does_ know. There’s always something – a policy, a secret, a scandal, a carefully chosen employee to pass the worst decisions on to – that cracks the otherwise flawless facade and its promises of a utopia and over the years, he had become disillusioned even with the best of them. People, human or otherwise, are fallible. It can’t be helped, unless—

Unless they aren’t people at all, he supposes. It had never occurred to him as a solution before and the rest of the Galaxy – barring Naboo, it seems – must have considered it too much to meddle with the natural order of things, if this is the first time he’s hearing about this.

“So she’s a droid?” He asks, somewhat reverent when faced with the perfect replica of humanity in front of him, still and unflinching. Had he not been warned in advance, he would have thought he was standing in front of a living, breathing woman. There’s nothing mechanical about her that he can see, though her eyes are vacant in a way they usually are only when their owner’s life had ended.

 _Or_ , he amends, _when it hasn’t yet begun_.

“Oh, not at all!” Naboo’s senator seems unsettled by the comparison. “Not at all, dear boy. She’s a consciousness. Perfected for all her people’s wants and needs in a way no human could ever be. Everyone who so wishes can send their wants and demands directly to her. She’s never overwhelmed. She never tires. She can work day and night, for as long as the people of Naboo need their leader – and they always do, of course; it’s why leaders exist.”

“Of course,” Anakin echoes. Her eyes still draw him in, although he’s more puzzled than curious this time. Nothing about the woman in front of him suggests consciousness. “And this is your attempt to, what? Gift her with a body?”

“You could call it that, I suppose.” The man seems too proud of his work to be unwilling to share any aspect of it, but there’s an edge of discomfort to his voice now. “Padme – that’s the name we gave her – has been doing a splendid job this far, but we would like a more personal approach on her side, so to speak. We want our people to trust her entirely, separate as she is from political influence, and it’s a difficult goal to aim for when they consider her a program in someone else’s hands. A body would be— helpful, we thought, should we want to use her to maximum capacity.”

A person, but designed to be used all the same. Anakin braces himself against the indignation – separate from his own, for once, but no less powerful with the way it’s clawing into wounds that have yet to heal. “I see. You haven’t figured out a way to connect her to the body yet, though.”

“That would be where you come in,” the man nods, clearly relieved to be free from scrutiny when Anakin directs his attention back to the vacant figure in front of him. “It took our brightest minds to get us this far in the first place, but such an action— it would be nothing short of a miracle.”

For the first time since his arrival – and a rather long time before that, too – Anakin finds himself smiling. It’s far from sincere, what with the bitterness still clinging to every bit of his life, especially where the Force is concerned, but, he supposes, it’s better than nothing.

“You can always count on me for one of those.”

~.~

It’s only fitting, he thinks later as he digs with the sort of enthusiasm suited only to those desperate for distraction into the neural network housing Padme’s consciousness, that this is what his life had come to. After he had tried – and failed – to save his mother and had left the Jedi Order over the berating that it had all resulted in – the routine, impersonal lecture on detachment and constraint had finally proved to be too much for him to bear – he had wandered aimlessly around the Galaxy with no clear goal or end in sight, picking up the odd job here and there to keep himself fed, his ship serving as his only home. Most of the time, he had worked as a mechanic – he’d been offered plenty of variety in that regard so far – but he had never once dared to reveal his past as a Jedi, let alone used his _gift_ to help him along.

Now, for the first time in forever, he’d answered a demand from someone familiar with his history, only to end up _here_ – light years away from any home he had ever known, doing his best to connect an artificially created body with an artificially created mind and create a person out of it. Obi-Wan would have been so very disappointed to hear that he just can’t keep himself from meddling with the Force’s judgement as to who should die and who should live, but – thank the Maker – what Obi-Wan thinks is no longer his biggest concern. It’s still _a_ concern, despite Anakin’s continuous attempts to forget about it all, but that’s a worry for another time. For once, he’s got more pressing matters to attend to.

“You think this is wrong.”

Anakin flinches violently enough to drop one of the tools he’d kept floating by his side for ease of access, and even that feels like an understatement of a reaction at the voice, clear and all-encompassing, that rings out from every surface around him. It makes her laugh, though, and he finds himself smiling tentatively in response.

“Padme?”

“Yes.” It’s impossible to determine where she’s supposed to be, but he had been warned – it _is_ rather uncanny. It must be even more so if the visitor is meant to be asking for help from her. “And you’re Anakin.”

“I am.” It shouldn’t be strange; that she can tell. Most droids can do a scan like that in seconds. The only thing that makes a difference here, really, is the fact that he can’t see her. It’s unnerving – being observed and left in the dark. He’d been doing it for quite a bit of his life by now. 

“Can you—” Having a visual of any kind would have helped – it always has in the past when it comes to machinery, but she’s neither here nor there when it comes to that, so it’s difficult trying to imagine what the proper etiquette could be. “Can you see me?”

“I know what you look like from your file, the same as everyone.” It sounds so matter-of-fact that he almost feels silly for asking. How would she know anything else? Her entire life so far had been in this in-between state; relying on both her senses and the bottomless pit of memory that her mind must be. Even on theory, it feels exhausting. “But I can’t _see_ , no. I imagine this is what you were sent here to take care of.”

She sounds _nothing_ like a droid. They don’t imagine things, don’t make assumptions; reality is set in stone, the facts woven together from the data they’ve been fed. Machines are fallible, but their minds rarely are.

Then again, she's not a machine. “No one told you?”

“They _did_ tell me that someone was coming. I always expected it would be a Jedi; who else could be up to the challenge but one of yours? I was glad,” she adds, as if suspecting that she might have offended him somehow. “I’ve been fascinated by the idea of the Force ever since my creation.”

A human would have said something along the lines of ‘ever since I was little’, but she’d never had that, Anakin supposes. “You have a file on that too, don’t you?”

“Plenty of them, yes.” She laughs again. It’s not difficult to imagine why – for all its faults, the Jedi Order had never lacked resources when it comes to their practice. “But there is a world of difference between a file and the way it must feel firsthand.” There’s a pensive pause and Anakin can almost hear her cogs, both literal and metaphorical, turning as he picks at yet another wire, forcing it to give up its hold on her. Each bit of separation from the machinery where she’s stored is a move made towards her body. “That’s what people always say, in any case.”

~.~

Anakin’s days end up being entirely consumed by his new task. Naboo is a beautiful world and its capital city is nothing if not a wonderful representative for that, but he barely gets an hour in the sunlight on a daily basis. It’s not for lack of opportunities, either – his employers aren’t in a hurry and they had made sure to provide him with the best possible accommodations; everything that money can buy in return for his work. He can eat in the gardens and enjoy the view or take long walks by the lakeside if the mood strikes him and he feels the need for a break, but oddly, he never does.

For a while, the routine had seemed to bother the senator. The man had hovered by Anakin’s side day and night, anxiously asking after everything he could possibly need, until Anakin had told him to get lost in the kindest but most uncertain way he could think of. He doesn’t need any of this – not the breaks, not the walks, and certainly not the mindless wandering around his temporary home’s landmarks. It’s not that the assignment had been given is easy – far from it – but that it has consumed him so effortlessly that anything else pales in comparison.

“It’s odd,” Padme says one day as he wrestles his way through yet another limitation to her consciousness. For a supposedly free, apolitical tool created solely for Naboo’s prosperity, the planet in question is holding her on a rather tight leash. Anakin’s not entirely sure that anyone who had come up with this brilliant plan had realised how much a body would free her. He’s not going to be the one to point it out; that much he knows. “You know what I look like, but _I_ don’t.”

“It’s just a body,” he mutters, a wrench in one of his hands and a datapad propped up on his knee. The computer’s unfamiliar, but nothing he can’t adapt to, thankfully. “I don’t know what _you_ look like.”

“That’s because I don’t look like _anything_ , Anakin.” He’s got accustomed to the cadence of her laughter by now; can tell what has provoked her amusement – or lack thereof – just by listening to it. _Is this a voice made especially for her?,_ he wonders, but doesn’t dare to ask. Did it belong to someone else before? It doesn’t seem like it – the body is brand new, after all – and he can’t help but hope it sounds the same once he does connect her to this new vessel. The thought of being unable to read her by the way she speaks feels unbearable even after a few short weeks.

“And I don’t look like anything to you either.” It’s a rather pointless conversation, seeing as she’ll catch up to his senses when she gets her body but he won’t ever know what it’s like to exist (live) the way she does, but he keeps it up relentlessly all the same. “That makes us even, I think.”

“Oh, Ani.” There’s an infinite gentleness to her voice that makes his eyes burn and his throat close up. “You always want everything to be fair, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. Who doesn’t?” He knows plenty of people who could serve as a perfect refute to his rhetorical question, but she doesn’t need to know that. There’s only so much that a mind can take; no reason to introduce her to the wider range of human emotions before she ever has to experience them.

“I certainly do,” she says. It sounds a lot like a white flag; one that he’s not quite sure what to do with. “And it saddens me when it isn’t, but it hurts you so much more.”

“It’s none of your concern.” Keeping his voice level is a challenge, but Anakin does his best. She’s well-familiar with her own feelings and those of others, but inflicting his own bitterness on her is the last thing he wants. There’s a gap in understanding when it comes to this, too – she has the capacity needed for emotion, but not the suffering that being dragged through human existence can inflict over the years. If she can be spared from that forever (and he doubts it will, if she has to take a world’s burdens on her shoulders), then he isn’t willing to be the one to ruin it. “You can’t change the things that hurt me.”

“No.” _Now_ she sounds sad. It’s not new – she’s compassionate to a fault – but it’s yet another thing Anakin had never wanted to cause. “ _You_ can, but you won’t.”

“I tried changing the Galaxy once.” It hadn’t been at all long ago, too, and he had done his very best, no matter how little the steps he had taken had been, but, “It didn’t go well. The best I can do is hope for the serenity to accept that.”

“I think you’re going to be hoping for a long time, Ani.”

She sounds sympathetic and far too kind and the last time he had heard that nickname, it had broken his heart, but Anakin doesn’t have the heart to say a thing about it. Not to her.

“I think so too.”

~.~

 _A miracle_ , the senator of Naboo had called his potential work, and even after seeing the dirtiest, most banal parts of it, Anakin has to agree.

In front of him, the body that he had grown used to seeing still and lifeless is flickering with motion every now and again, fleeting but stubborn. It’s all only happening in fragments for now – a twitch of the finger, an intake of breath, the furrowing of the eyebrows – before Padme retracts back into herself, but it’s something. She’s far more patient than any other person would have been, but he can understand that: she’d been _designed_ to be patient, and this is all so new to her. Any annoyance that anyone else could have felt with their body and its incessant urges is all serving to satisfy her endless curiosity and she can’t stop talking about it; so much so that Anakin ends up spending more time in the laboratory than he does in the apartments he’d been provided with. She hasn’t been able to hold control over the body for long enough to hold a conversation, but they communicate the way they always had so far. For him, it’s enough.

“Did you see that?” Her voice sounds so far away as she focuses all her attention on her efforts. “Almost ten seconds!”

“Yes, Padme.” It delights him more than he’d expected to see her so excited about the novelty of the experience, no matter how repetitive it is to him after more than twenty years. “Let me try something else—”

The Force spikes up around him once again. It’s an astonishing thing to discover; that he can find some wonder in it, still, after everything he had been through. He’d forcibly estranged from it for so long that it feels almost entirely new again, like it had when he had still been only a child. It had been a powerful drug, back then, to think that he could be something so preciously special that exceptions had had to be made for him, but even then, it had been laced with the devastation of having to leave his mother behind. Years of cultivated detachment had served to help with that, but it had never really erased the lesson he had learnt that day – his gift had come with a price. The Force had given him a lot and had taken just as much and he had rarely felt any kind of genuine joy from it.

This, now, might just be the closest he had ever come to it. It isn’t about the money anymore – he could walk off of Naboo without a single credit to his name and it would have made him happy anyway; just to know that he had made Padme as happy as she seems to be during their exercises together. She still spends the majority of her time solving all the complaints that her people bring to her, but she’d been allowed some more time to herself now, for as long as needed in order for the transition to take place.

“Perfect!” Whatever he had done, reaching blindly into the dark as he is, had apparently managed to give her what she’d wanted. “Look here, Anakin, I think if you can help me off of this platform, I can try out the leg muscles—”

~.~

He works better alone; Anakin had figured that out at an impressively young age. The only person he had ever formed a remotely functional team with before had been Obi-Wan and that hadn’t lasted forever. The connection he’d formed with Padme reminds him eerily of that. In a kinder world, they would have got along splendidly, he thinks, but he would really, really prefer not to think about that now – not when the independence he’d been offered so far is suddenly being intruded upon.

“This is most impressive, I must say,” the senator says for what has to be the thousandth time now and Anakin sighs loudly enough to be heard over the constant hum of the engines in Padme’s main control room.

“You really mustn’t.”

If the man is at all open to not so thinly veiled demands, it doesn’t show.

“She’s progressing much faster than we ever expected.” He sounds almost as if it’s his accomplishment to boast about and, although it must be true to a degree, a rush of irritation passes over Anakin before he can help himself. He sees her working tirelessly day after day, torn between the duties she’d been built for and the need to follow the path set for her when it comes to her physical form, and it’s stupid to feel so possessively proud over it all – he’s nothing more than yet another player in a food chain much bigger than him; her accomplishments aren’t his to keep to himself.

And yet, he’s the only one she’s shared them with so far. Now that the senator is here, Padme is quiet, leaving her creators to assume that she’s too busy with her usual responsibilities to pay either of them any mind, but Anakin can feel the anxious anticipation in the air; can sense her hope for further development again today, far from the prying eyes of the people who had sent him here. This, all on its own, is new, too – this awareness of her and the finest changes in her state of mind. While he’d been too busy trying to figure out everything about her, from the inner workings of the way she’d been created to the emotions she’d been engineered to feel and had later taken full control of, she had snuck up on him, gradually, and had become a part of his life he doesn’t think he’s quite ready to let go of.

“It’ll be a while before she’ll be completely merged with the body,” he warns, somewhat victorious and ever so slightly apologetic. He isn’t being rushed – that’s the one thing he _is_ sure of, since the man in front of him can’t seem to tire of being impressed with the things Anakin can do on demand – but it’s a reminder he offers every single time anyway, as an insurance more than anything else. “This is entirely new for her.”

“Of course, of course.” The senator is too distracted by the wonder of it all to care about Padme’s slow acclimatisation to the mould they’re so enthusiastic to put her in and, eager for distraction, Anakin buries himself back under the console to continue his work. There’s only so much fawning he can take while Padme is right _there_ , listening to every word. “Well, I’ll leave you to it, my boy.”

 _Please do_. They nod their goodbyes and the senator swans out of the room, promptly taking the tension away with him. Silence reigns over the room for a while longer, as if they’re both waiting to make sure that he truly is gone, and Anakin lets himself breathe again.

He’s not being sent away anytime soon. He’s _not_. It’s difficult to tell what Padme feels on the matter, considering that they don’t talk about his eventual departure at all, but he can sense it in her reluctance when it comes to the topic, too, in the quiet hush that falls over them both every time either of them mentions the time when she’ll finally be ready.

Physically, it’ll be a while; he hadn’t lied in that regard. Mentally, he’s far less sure of how smoothly things could possibly go. He had talked to Padme about his mother at length, per her prodding, but she had never mentioned enough of her own past for him to be able to make an assumption of any kind. In that sense, she’s both much younger and much older than him – despite the responsibility for an entire world being passed on to her, she’s never known the sort of duty that a family, by blood or otherwise, tends to require. Does it matter at all to her if she doesn’t follow in her creators’s footsteps once she’s set loose on the Galaxy? Does she file away their expectations the way he always has, in perfect detail despite his fallible human memory? Does she try to follow them quite as desperately?

He doesn’t dare to ask, and the chances of her answering now of all times are slim to none, so Anakin goes back to his work in the resulting silence between them. It’s comfortable now that they’re alone, but more and more often, it doesn’t really feel _enough_. He wants to hear her, all of her; the best and the worst, every thought she’d chosen to bite back for either of their sakes. It’s always been his fatal flaw, he knows, asking for more than what he’s offered and then some, but he can’t help it – not when it comes to her.

It’s a quiet sort of resolution, but to his terror, it sticks around this time. _Whatever she wants, I’ll do_ , he vows. She can’t hear him the way he can hear her, through the Force, but it doesn’t matter; it’s very likely that he already knows. He had never been too good at wearing his heart anywhere but on his sleeve and it’s only a matter of time before she knows it, too.

For all he knows, it’s going to happen the moment she looks him in the eye for the first time. Given how scared they both seem to be of the prospect – at least as much as they’re overjoyed – it might also happen to be the last time.

~.~

Two months in, she can walk unassisted, the majority of her body’s functions no longer as much of a mystery as they had been at the beginning, and Padme is _beaming_.

It’s a tricky thing; this ever-changing communication of theirs. She can’t quite figure out talking just yet, so Anakin does the majority of it for her when she inhabits the body made for her, and she returns the favour with all her newest impressions of her environment when she’s retracted back into the console that had housed her so far.

“I’ll figure it out eventually, I know,” she says and there’s a confidence in her tone that he had been able to detect since the start, now accompanied with a visual – Anakin knows the way her face lights up with determination whenever she’s presented with yet another new challenge. There’s a gleam in her brown eyes that always accompanies it, too; daring and just a touch mischievous, as if she knows she’s pushing at boundaries no one had ever expected her to break. “It’s the last thing I’ve got left and then it’ll finally be done.”

If he could have stopped the words from coming out, he would have. Subtlety had never been his strongest suit, however, and, “And that’ll be a goodbye, I suppose.”

The pause that follows has him frozen on edge, as if a single word from her could break him or rise him up. That _is_ the case, of course – it had been almost since the start, when he’d discovered her piece by piece; her joy at the smallest details of a universe he had fallen out of love with a long time ago, her compassion, the endless care that no one person should have ever been capable of, her curiosity for everything she had ever been denied in her creators’s pursuit of the perfect ruler. He isn’t particularly interested in letting her know that, now that they’re so close to never seeing each other again.

“Does it have to be?” She sounds confused and a touch hurt, the sentiment laced with astonishment as her awareness keeps flickering between her body and the main control room which surrounds him. Hurt feels different in a human body, he supposes – it’s just as endless as she had described it to him when trying to voice the sensations of what every emotion she’d ever felt had been like, but limited to something material. It’s suffocating. Claustrophobic. He would have never wished it to her; had never figured that it would hurt _him_ as much as it does to see her discover it. “You could stay. All my advisors love you; you could do things for us that no one ever has managed before. Some of the projects they have—”

“You’re not a _project_ , Padme.”

There’s a startling surge of warmth in the Force coming from her general direction; one that she couldn’t have purposefully sent and all the more precious for that. “To you, I’m sure.” She’s as perfectly collected as always – there’s no way for a manufactured voice to malfunction the way the one coming from a human mouth could, he supposes – but there’s a brittle edge to it, too; as if she’s trying to break the news gently to him. It only serves to make him angrier and, for once, he’s rather glad that they’re not looking each other in the eye. “How long can I be the perfect queen, do you think, once I leave this place? I won’t be there for the people at all times anymore. I’ll get tired and hungry and sick like everyone else does. I know that that’s why you’re here,” she continues before he can as much as draw in a breath, “and I know they wanted me to be more approachable, easier to trust— but I’ll be just another person, Anakin. Just like them. Just like you. When I get tired of the politics – when I find I can’t do it any longer – what will be left of me then?”

“You’ll still be you, no matter what your— purpose is supposed to be now.” Even suggesting otherwise sounds like an offence, but to her, it seems like the most universal of truths. It’s unimaginable. “How can you even ask me that?” It’s an endless list of questions and he knows it well – he had put himself through them for months on end when he had left the Order and has yet to come up with an answer to any of them – but it feels so very different when it’s her on the line. “Who you were made to be is not everything you are, Padme.”

“Then who am I?” She detaches herself from her body for long enough to speak, but he knows this look in her eyes too – fierce and unrelenting, drilling into him when she suspects he might be trying to soften a blow or dodge a truth. She doesn’t need to; by now, every minute shift in her tone of voice is enough for him to detect the change in her mood and even that’s got nothing on the way the Force in him wraps around her, protective and determined like it rarely had been before. The cruel irony that he had sensed upon his arrival – the gift of life misplaced on someone other than the one he had done his best to save – feels like something entirely different now; a whole new universe of choices laid out for him to do as he likes, to create and teach and _change_. It clicks into place in a way it hadn’t for all those years in the Order and it rushes through him, euphoric and more hopeful than he would usually dare to be. “ _What_ am I when I’m not the queen?”

When he looks her in the eyes now, she’s right there, he can tell that much, and Anakin makes sure she holds his gaze when he speaks again, before this precious, fragile connection can manage to break once again for the time being. He tries to pour it all through this one look – the promise to stay if it’s what she wants, or to leave alongside her, if it ever comes to that. For now, nothing else seems to matter to her but this one reassurance. Luckily, it’s the easiest promise he has ever made.

“Everything.”

~.~

“Padme?” It’s just the two of them here, just like usual, and yet, he feels more unsure than he had at any point in this process. She makes a noise of acknowledgment, smiling up at him tentatively, and he cups the side of her face, encouragement and a greeting all at once. This should be it. She had been ready, she’d said, and he’d made sure to prepare her for it to the best of his ability. “Is everything—”

“Yes.” It comes out scratchy and hesitant and Padme clears her throat delicately, the grip she has on his forearms loosening somewhat as everything about this new form finally, finally clicks into place. “Yes, it’s all right.” She reaches up now, too, mirroring his own caress, and her eyes glisten with something he’s never seen in them before; something he’s all too impatient to explore, should they be given the chance. “Anakin.”

Her voice _does_ sound different out loud, he realises, but as it turns out, it doesn’t matter one bit – it’s still the one certain point in his world, and Anakin finds himself grinning right back, unrestrained and easy and happier than anything’s ever made him, as he takes her by the hand and lets her lead him towards the world waiting for her outside.

****


End file.
